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The operation highlights the risks taken by detectives in their efforts to gain justice for Stephen. Up to 20 officers were on standby in a ‘support team’ in case their undercover colleague’s cover was blown and his life placed in danger.

On occasions, the officer was ‘wired up’
and a live feed of conversations between him and the suspects relayed to
a police building, where a colleague would be listening and taking
notes. A psychologist advised senior officers on strategy.

Grilling: The police video shows David Norris being interviewed on the same day

The house was paid for out of a fund for undercover police operations. A well-placed source said: ‘When a property came on the market close to one of the suspects, it was too good an opportunity to miss.’

The operation was closely monitored by Yard chiefs because of sensitivities over the use of an undercover officer in the Rachel Nickell murder inquiry.

An Old Bailey judge was scathing of the decision to use a blonde policewoman in a honeytrap operation to obtain a confession from former suspect Colin Stagg.

Ultimately, the Lawrence undercover operation, which lasted several months during a no-expense-spared probe into Stephen’s murder between 1999 and 2003, failed to obtain leads or secure a confession.

Guilty: Gary Dobson, left, and David Norris went
on trial for the murder of Stephen Lawrence six weeks ago. Both men
denied the charge

The 19-year saga included a series of failed police inquiries and is estimated to have cost up to £50million. The four-year-long forensic review which prompted the new murder trial cost £3.8million.

During Scotland Yard’s biggest ever murder hunt, officers also:

Bugged conversations between the five prime suspects while they prepared for a prime-time television interview with celebrity broadcaster Martin Bashir;

Recorded their conversations as they played golf during a holiday in Scotland that followed the interview. Their comments were relayed by satellite from tiny microphones hidden in their golf trolleys;

With the permission of the Home Secretary, bugged thousands of their telephone conversations. Separately, a top Yard officer authorised bugging operations on their homes, cars and workplaces. Even their pubs and snooker halls were bugged;

Finally called in a private forensics firm that had solved the Rachel Nickell and Damilola Taylor murders.

A source said: ‘The Yard did everything you could think of in a James Bond movie to crack this case.’

The unprecedented, anti-terror style bugging operation on the five prime suspects was made necessary because of the bungled initial police response to Stephen’s murder.

Despite having compelling evidence within hours, officers decided not to arrest anyone for two weeks. The error – examined here in this investigation – had grave consequences for the police and justice.

FATAL ATTACK LASTED JUST TEN SECONDS

Stephen was stabbed to death at around 10.30pm on April 22, 1993, in an attack that lasted around ten seconds. He was with his friend Duwayne Brooks at a bus stop in Well Hall Road, Eltham, South-East London, when he was approached by a gang of white youths who yelled out ‘what, what n****r’ before surrounding him.

Guilty: A sickening racist rant by David Norris
was caught by the secret police surveillance cameras, helping convict
him and Gary Dobson

Neil Acourt demonstrates plunging a knife into
Luke Knight in Dobson's flat. The pair were not on trial but were
friends of the guilty pair

As Duwayne fled the scene, getting only a fleeting glimpse of the mob, Stephen was knifed to a depth of about five inches on both sides of the front of his body, to the chest and arm. He ran about 130 yards before collapsing and dying.

Three eyewitnesses were at the bus stop but none was able to identify any of the fleeing gang.

The killing led to Operation Fishpool that, over nearly two decades, would involve 16 arrests, 1,378 statements and 835 house calls.

ANONYMOUS TIP-OFF IN A PHONE BOX

Tip-offs to police soon suggested the involvement of five thugs – brothers Neil and Jamie Acourt, aged 17 and 16 respectively, David Norris, 16, Luke Knight, 16, and Gary Dobson, 17. All apart from Norris, who lived in Chislehurst, were based on or near the Brook Estate in Eltham. The gang had a reputation for carrying out unprovoked knife attacks on both white and black people.

One note to police that was left in a telephone kiosk said: ‘The people involved in last night’s stabbing are: Neil Acourt, Jamie Acourt, David Norris and Gary Dobson. These b*****ds are definitely involved and must be stopped because they keep getting away with it. Approach these sh*** with care. Do us a favour and prove it. Good luck.’

Another with the same names was left under the windscreen wiper of a police car. It read: ‘Be careful when you arrest them. The house is full of knives.’

There was a climate of extreme fear in Eltham because of the reputation of Norris’s father Clifford, a violent gangster then on the run for major drugs offences.

The surveillance camera caught the men discussing how to kill people with a knife

The men filmed were regularly seen brandishing knives and frequently using racist terms

One anonymous message named Neil Acourt and Norris as members of a ‘group of youths on the Kidbrooke Estate who always carry knives and threaten people’.

The most important tip to officers was from ‘a skinhead’ who walked into Plumstead Police Station and identified the killers as Jamie and Neil Acourt together with David Norris and ‘two other males identity unknown’.

By April 24, 1993, there were ten separate pieces of information, nine directly and one indirectly identifying the Acourts and their associates. But it would be another 13 days – on May 7 – before three of the suspects were arrested.

Dithering, incompetence and a lack of rigour at the start of the investigation meant detectives delayed carrying out vital searches.

In his 1999 public inquiry report, Sir William Macpherson blamed racist attitudes for the police’s failings in the Lawrence case and said that Stephen’s mother and father had been treated with ‘insensitivity and lack of sympathy’.

He also said he and his inquiry team had been ‘astonished by the lack of direction and organisation during the vital hours after the murder’.Senior Yard sources insist the initial stages of the inquiry were hampered by sloppiness and poor management, rather than bigotry.

ARRESTS AND A HAUL OF WEAPONS

At the Acourts’ home, officers found a large number of weapons. A knife was found behind a TV set. In a padlocked bedroom a Gurkha type knife was found. In the living room, under the cushions of a settee, there was a sword in a scabbard. There was a shoulder holster in a cupboard. There were knives in Jamie’s bedroom, and an ‘air gun type revolver’.

The Acourts, along with Dobson who was detained at his family home, were taken away for questioning by police.

Officers later found a large knife in Dobson’s girlfriend’s bedroom. Norris – not at home during the raids – turned up with his lawyer at a police station three days later. There was only enough evidence to charge Neil Acourt and Luke Knight, who was arrested at a later stage.

But in July 1993 the Crown Prosecution Service dropped the case. Not only were there problems with the testimony of Duwayne Brooks, but forensic tests on clothes, shoes and knives were drawing a blank, and there were no new witnesses.

It was a very weak case, concluded prosecutors.

The development prompted a review of the case by a senior officer, who wrongly concluded the investigation was progressing ‘satisfactorily and all lines of inquiry correctly pursued’.

The assertions, widely condemned as a whitewash, held up progress for months.

THE FAMILY’S PRIVATE PROSECUTION

By June 1994 the police investigation was at a particularly low ebb.

With no breakthrough in sight, Yard chiefs decided that there should be a fresh inquiry. Later that year, detectives installed a covert ‘audio and visual’ probe in a flat occupied by Dobson.

During December, films and recordings were made which showed that all members of the gang, except Jamie Acourt, who was in custody over other matters, had ‘a propensity for violence and the carriage of knives and raving bigotry’.

They made revolting and explicit racist comments and remarks. Knives were waved about. But nothing from the thousands upon thousands of hours of surveillance material directly implicated the suspects.

Frustrated: Stephen's parents, Neville and Doreen have had a
long battle for justice. This picture was taken one week after his death
on April 22, 1993

Nevertheless, lawyers representing Stephen’s frustrated parents advised them there was enough evidence to launch a private prosecution against the five prime suspects.

A private prosecution is a criminal proceeding initiated by an individual or private organisation instead of the Crown Prosecution Service, which represents the state.

The Lawrences obtained court orders allowing them to take possession of the CPS evidence files on the case, including the so-called ‘video of hate’.

Privately, a number of senior CPS
officials believed the Lawrences had been badly advised, saying such
action could scupper the chances of them getting justice a later date.

In
1996, an Old Bailey judge threw out their prosecution of three of the
suspects because of doubts about the evidence of Duwayne Brooks .

The
trial had not even opened when all three suspects – Dobson, Neil Acourt
and Knight – were acquitted and as the law stood then, could not face a
new murder trial.

Breakthrough: A previously unreleased photo of a forensic scientist collecting blood and fibers from a knife in the LGC Forensics laboratory in Culham, Oxfordshire

The two other gang members, Norris and Jamie Acourt, had murder charges against them thrown out at committal stage in 1995 – meaning there would be no legal barrier to them standing trial subsequently.

NEW OPERATION WAS PURE ‘JAMES BOND’

Just weeks before the Macpherson report was published in February 1999, then Met Deputy Commissioner John Stevens asked one of his top detectives, John Grieve, to launch a no-expense spared new probe.

Career detective Mr Stevens told Mr Grieve, a deputy assistant commissioner, he could recruit the best detectives in the force.

At its peak, 120 officers were working on Operation Athena Tower, which lasted four years.

Yard chiefs were in constant contact with the then Home Secretary Jack Straw, the only person who could authorise telephone intercepts on the suspects.

Yard Assistant Commissioner David Veness approved dozens of bugging operations on the gang’s cars, homes and workplaces, while a surveillance team was constantly on their trail.

A source said: ‘It was run like a big anti-terror operation. The team had every piece of kit you have ever heard of. It was pure James Bond.’

It was during this phase that a house was purchased in the same street as one of the murder suspects, and an undercover officer tasked with infiltrating the gang.

TV INTERVIEW AND A SPY HELICOPTER

Two months after the Grieve probe started, the five suspects agreed to be interviewed by Martin Bashir on ITV’s Tonight With Trevor McDonald.

Programme makers were in close contact with the Met before the programme was recorded but for legal reasons, detectives ruled out suggesting the line of questioning.

Had they done so, defence lawyers could have argued they had used Bashir as ‘an agent of the police’ – scuppering the possibility of using it as evidence at any future trial.

Bedrooms and other pre-selected rooms in the secret house in Scotland where the interview was filmed had recording devices installed.

Scotland Yard even had a helicopter hover over the group as they played golf nearby, recording their comments, relayed by satellite from tiny microphones hidden in their golf trolleys. But the ‘bugged golf buggies’ did not provide any vital new leads – and neither did the TV show.

In May 2004, the CPS announced there was insufficient evidence to bring murder charges. One detective remarked at the time that the Yard’s best hope was if one of the suspects ‘became a vicar’ and gave a true account of what happened.

AT LAST, A FORENSICS BREAKTHROUGH

Two years later, Scotland Yard secretly launched a multi-million-pound forensic review of the Lawrence case involving the privately run company LGC, which had helped solve the killings of schoolboy Damilola Taylor and mother-of-one Rachel Nickell on Wimbledon Common.

When the forensic review got under way, officers began to re-examine material held from earlier phases of the investigation.

In November 2007, the Mail revealed there had been a forensic breakthrough in the case – particularly involving fibres – which left the original suspects facing re-arrest and a new trial for murder.

At the time, senior officers warned that further tests were necessary and it would be years before officers were ready to mount a fresh prosecution.

However in July last year, the Mail revealed that two of the original gang members were on the brink of being charged with murder.

They were formally accused two months later, although this could not be reported at the time because of a temporary court reporting ban.

Acting Deputy Commissioner Cressida Dick, who has overseen the Lawrence probe since 2006, said: ‘It is an extraordinary inquiry.

‘When you put all different aspects together, it is clearly utterly unique.

‘We can’t think of another very large case which has run on and on, in the same way, over 18 years.’